Season of Hardship Connects Struggling Workers in Two Worlds

Millions of Americans barely scraped by this holiday season, stuck in poverty-wage jobs or mired in unemployment. But the latest retail sector reports show that we did manage to shop a little more,
perhaps because people are resorting to the material comforts of
consumption to make up for the misery they've suffered as workers. And
it's that appetite for consumer goods that has shaped the holiday
wishlist of struggling workers on the other side of the world, who are
growing increasingly impatient in their demands for a decent standard of
living.

The spontaneous strikes
that rippled through China's auto industry last year alarmed both
officials and employers, and resulted in modest gains for workers at
multinational companies like Toyota and Honda, which openly capitalize
on the country's absurdly low labor costs.

Employers, not surprisingly, claim that pushing up wages would
impose an undue burden on their bottom line. And there are legitimate
fears that rising labor costs, combined with arbitrary tax policies,
could drive factories to simply move to cheaper regions, according to
the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin.
That's not to let employers off the hook, though. The main obstacle to
achieving wage equity, CLB argues, is the lack of a truly democratic
collective-bargaining system, which neither employers nor party
officials have much interest in establishing:

So far however, the government has only used administrative means,
raising the minimum wage, and coercion/persuasion when intervening in
strikes and protests. What it has so far failed to do is to encourage
employers and to empower employees to engage in collective bargaining
that could establish decent and affordable wage levels and working
conditions and practices that are acceptable to both management and
labour.

In an analysis of the impact of the wildcat auto strikes--a dramatic
surge of activism in the booming southern industrial heartland--Boy
Lüthje wonders whether workers, with the backing of the local media and
even some state-run trade unions, now have enough clout to sustain pressure on their bosses:

Often, local governments back up violations of labor law by major
investors, as has been documented in many cases for suppliers to
multinationals such as Wal-Mart, Apple, and Nike.

But under conditions of rapid growth and highly modern production,
the methods of control have become ineffective. Hundreds of labor
conflicts occurred in the wake of the global economic crisis, affecting
millions of Chinese workers in 2008 and 2009. Following the recovery,
workers are seeking a voice....

It is the activism of young migrant workers with almost no
experience in workplace organizing that is providing lessons to the
unions-not only in China, but throughout the industrialized world.

That's a tall order for the world's most paradoxical proletariat.
The rabble of China's migrant workers, many of whom are children of
peasant farmers with little education and sometimes not even a stable
address, might seem an unlikely model for grassroots labor organizing.

Yet recent violence in Bangladesh over wages highlights how labor
tensions in the Global South are trending toward a mass movement.
Earlier this month, thousands of workers demonstrated and blocked traffic at two factories outside Dhaka, outraged at the delayed implementation of a new minimum wage (which fell far short of union demands
to begin with). In the aftermath of a bloody clash with police, the
political volatility surrounding wage pressures appears to be reaching a
breaking point across the region, and business interests are wising up to newly emboldened workers' willingness to hold both employers and government officials accountable.

And what about here in the U.S.? Seven states will kick off 2011 by
raising their minimum wages by about nine to twelve cents per hour,
primarily to keep pace with the rising cost of living. The National Employment Law Project notes
that "Strengthening the buying power of low-wage workers is especially
critical in the current economic climate... because the majority of new
jobs created in the wake of the recession are in low- and mid-wage
industries."

Still, current minimum wage rates, whether it's the federal baseline
of $7.25 an hour (roughly $15,000 annually, if you can survive till the
end of the year on that) or slightly higher state mandates, are often far too low to lift a typical family out of poverty, and not even close to a living wage in many cities. Not to mention the people who gone months or years without a job and face little hope of earning even the bare minimum in the coming year.

So those toys and gadgets that we wishfully spent our savings on may
have made the holidays a little more bearable. But remember that that
they're symbols of other aspirations, too: the fruits of a parallel
labor force toiling away at Santa's workshop in Shenzhen. This season,
from Detroit to Dhaka, working people are connected not just through
global trade routes, but through an unrelenting struggle to earn a
dignified living.

Further

Surrounded by a massive police presence, the country's top law enforcement official told a group of carefully screened students at Georgetown's Law School that, "In this great land, the government does not tell you what to think or what to say." In his speech, only announced the day before, Sessions went on to denounce uppity knee-taking football players and defend his boss' call, hours before, for them to be fired. We may need to upgrade the ole Irony Alert buzzer. It can't keep up.